Notes from an 18-hour conversation

After the last Indie Web Club meet in August, we went to Tanjore as usual. From there, a few of us went to get matcha, the converstion then moved to dinner and ended only after breakfast next morning.

Here are a few notes from the conversation:

On hiring interviews, and evaluating people based on intuition

I have been doing a lot of hiring interviews lately at work. I wanted to know what criteria others have when making hiring decisions.

For me, at this point, I just want to work with people I like being around and can also have conversations with beyond work. (Which isn’t true for most people at my workplace).

The hiring interviews were for the role of Product Manager.

A majority of applicants for the role come from an engineer-turned-MBA background. A lot of these engineer-turned-MBA types are people without expertise in any specific domain. I found that they tend to rely heavily on jargon (and incredibly long monologues) to mask this lack of expertise. My experience with this tpe of Product Managers in the past have not been very pleasant either.

My colleagues’ approach to the interview was to throw random RCA (i.e. root cause analysis) questions at the candidates. Which I felt was not a very effective way to gauge anyone’s problem solving skills in a real world setting anyway.

So I’ve been relying heavily on intuition to evaluate the interviewees.

I was more interested in finding out what the person is like outside of work, and their ability to listen and have a back and forth conversation (which, sursprisingly, most candatitates were not very good at).

(In the end, the two people we hired were from unexpected backrougs. One of them had an agricultural hardware startuo and the other is a former architect, like me.)

Stop using the word art

Highly abstract words, like “art,” are a detriment to productive conversation.

The trouble with highly abstract words is that people have very different images in their minds when using the same word.

I may be thinking of the fancy editing in the last GRWM reel I saw on Instagram 2 minutes ago, while you are thinking about Michaelangelo’s frescoes in The Sistine Chapel. While both may legitimately be considered “art,” these two images are poles apart.

And while we hold these two disparate images in mind, attempts at communication will be frustrating, for we will only talk past each other.

Communication is always better when we use more specific and more sensory details to express what is on our minds. Abstraction can be a useful rhetorical tool, but in everyday conversations, it is a hindrance.

Another issue with the word “art”, in particular, is that it is used way more often to shut down conversation than to expand it. We forget that words are not real. They are merely parts of speech. In the same way a map is not the territory. But often, we treat words (like “art”) not only as real, but also sacred. Which is why critiques of a work of art is met less often with “I want to understand your perspective, why you did not like it…” (expanding the conversation) instead of “oh, but it is art!” (shutting down the conversation).

On attachment to self-identitites

We should be less attached to our self-identities.

We attach a lot of value to knowing and understanding ourselves these days. We want to know who we truly are and what our values are. Being “true to oneself,” often comes up in conversations as the destination to strive for.

It is, in some ways, misguided.

Seeking an intrinsic self-identity is paradoxical. For there is no way to express a self-identity which is not a description of the external world.

Every act of identifying oneself implies a dichotomy. I can attach my identity to, to take an example, being “kind” only if there exists an external world where there is unkindness. If I am kind, it is only relative to the world around me.

Concepts we attach to our identities to, in this way, are merely descriptions the of (i)the external world, and (ii)our relationship to the external world (i.e.: “The external world is unkind. I think I am relatively kinder than the external world. Therefore, I must be a kind person.”) They can never be truly intrinsic.

What also happens once we attach ourselves too deeply with a self-identity, is that we open ourselves to avoidable emotional strife. We get upset when our self-identities are not validated by others. (For example: I feel upset about being called unkind, because I am attached to the idea of being someone kind. I do not feel so upset about being called clumsy, for being agile is not something I am attached to.)